Aurel Schmidt
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
The talk will begin at 7pm at the Western Front, located at 303 east 8th Avenue.
Aurel Schmidt’s intricately detailed drawings include objects and creatures such as flies, condoms, and cigarette butts that are pieced together to form larger figures. Through exquisite draftsmanship, Schmidt questions conventions of beauty and masculinity as well as standard associations with decomposition, rot, and refuse. She relates her interest in finding the beauty in ugliness to the idea of the human condition as a cyclical process of renewal and decay. By using the detritus of our lives as the building blocks for her subjects, Schmidt’s work becomes a sort of memento mori—a reminder of our own vulnerability and mortality.